From punch cards to punch-ups

Computer Space: a glamorous arcade incarnation of Spacewar

12:01AM BST 21 Oct 2006

A humble battle between spaceships launched the start of a billion-pound industry, reports Robert Colvile.

Given the way things have turned out, it's no surprise that the first video game involved people shooting at each other. Then, it was a couple of wire-frame spaceships orbiting around a sun; today, it's legions of elves and orcs and goblins meeting up online to bash each other's brains out.

Spacewar! was the most popular game of 1962 because it was the only game, cooked up and programmed on to punch cards by a bunch of students at MIT. World of Warcraft is the most popular game of 2006 largely because it combines fantastic violence with a fantastic community.

But there's another difference between then and now: electronic gaming is now an industry worth nearly £17 billion a year. This is thanks to a history, traced in the Game On exhibition, which opens today at the Science Museum, of startling technological growth.

"We've had almost three decades where there's been a doubling of performance every couple of years," says industry veteran David Braben. "That applies to graphics, memory, sound – and, of course, to people's expectations."

Braben, 42, is more responsible than most for that change. In 1984, he and a friend called Ian Bell created Elite, a three-dimensional space-flight game in which the player traded and fought their way around the galaxy. This ability to choose your own path was, at the time, revolutionary.

"There was huge resistance to it," Braben says. "We were told, 'We want a game that takes about 10 minutes; people won't want to mess with saving their position.' The received wisdom was that games should be things like Pac-Man."

Games have certainly progressed technically since that era, but have they changed all that much? Braben admits being told by a developer of the Grand Theft Auto series, the most successful franchise of the past decade, that the idea was "Elite in a city" – cruising around an open-ended environment; accepting missions if you felt inclined; constantly changing and upgrading your vehicle. This time round there are just better graphics, better music, and a few more hookers.

Of course, the series is wonderfully made, and really good fun. But looking at Grand Theft Auto and its legion of imitators, you sense a problem. Gaming in the Eighties, certainly in Britain, was a home-brew paradise, with slightly lunatic coders coming up with terrifically off-the-wall ideas. Now that gaming is a media industry like any other, the racks resemble those of a video store, filled with clones of and sequels to the most popular titles and merchandised tie-ins that all but invariably disappoint. Braben's last game, for example, was a less-than-radical film-to-game adaptation of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Matt Fox, author of The Video Games Guide encyclopaedia, provides an explanation. "In the new millennium, the average game went up to taking around 18 months to complete, with a budget of £3 million to £6 million. The failure of a single game could mean life or death for a software house, so many just stayed within the tried-and-tested genres."

The formula has been good to the industry heavyweights. The American company EA (Electronic Arts) is the largest games developer in the world, thanks largely to its immense income from sports titles, such as the FIFA football series, which feature real-world players and are updated very slightly each year. Nintendo's mascots – Mario, Zelda and Pokémon (see reviews on the facing page) – reappear in title after title. Add-on packs for The Sims, the series based around copying real-life interaction, have sold 24 million copies.

The situation is Hollywood's dream: Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie will inevitably start to creak at the joints, or demand a greater cut of a franchise's proceeds. But Lara Croft and Sonic the Hedgehog will never grow old – in fact, as processing power increases, they can only get prettier. And in genres from Second World War re-enactments to beat-em-ups, fans lap up the sequels in which they appear: Square Enix, a Japanese developer of role-playing games, is about to release the 13th in its chart-topping Final Fantasy series. Furthermore, each of these games can be re-packaged as new systems come along: this summer Square sold half a million copies of a handheld version of Final Fantasy III, a 16-year-old game tarted up with some 3-D graphics, in just five days.

However, there are signs that the wheel may be turning. New console accessories are stimulating different styles of game-play – for example with dance mats, motion-capture cameras or karaoke microphones. Hand-held systems are offering an opening for quirky puzzle games; digital delivery to a console or PC allows smaller software companies to offer their games for download.

Braben says there is also the added potential for complexity offered by increasingly sophisticated machines. "There's a comparison I like to make with film. In the 1920s, people went to see Buster Keaton-humour, cars crashing into trains on level crossings. That's very much where we've been in games: the story, the emotional hook, has very much been secondary.

"But now we're starting to see games which have emotional interaction, which you haven't seen before. Games are racing forward. If anything, we're at the start of a process, not at the end."